Licensing Contact Form

Since 2012 Scoop’s terms and conditions have clearly stated that commercial use of Scoop content requires the purchase of a Scoop Organisation Licence.

Commercial is defined as: “companies, organisations, institutions, partnerships, government departments, associations and societies, trusts and other entities, whether registered or unregistered, private or public, and whether for profit or not for profit that use Scoop Content in any professional capacity.”

And use is defined as: “encompasses, but is not limited to, downloading, sharing, e-mailing, direct linking, copying, reading, extracting, scraping, selling content, by employees, workers, agents or automated devices, or anything else what-so-ever that could be reasonably held to violate Scoop’s copyright pursuant to applicable copyright law and Scoop’s limitations of use.”

Scoop’s Ethical (Invisible) Paywall - The Practical Implications

This is perhaps most easily understood if one considers the counter-factual. If our paywall was not invisible - like for example the one at NBR - then it might be possible for someone to get around it and into our website and read the content.

Were they to do so then they would be clearly breaching our terms and conditions of use.

In NBR’s case they are providing a barrier to enforce their paywall. In Scoop’s case however because we want to maintain free public access we are operating more on an honesty box principle. I.E. If upon honest reflection you or your organisation is using Scoop in a professional capacity then you ought to purchase a license.

In the alternative if you decide that you do not want anyone in your organisation to access Scoop professionally you are free to put in place a firewall at your end to block access.

For Scoop’s part we reserve the right to block users of Scoop who we have deemed to be commercial users of Scoop, who have been asked to comply with Scoop’s terms, and who refuse to do so.